John turned to the door. ‘No. I’ll walk until I can live with myself. I feel …’ He made a strange distressed gesture. ‘I feel all … racked … I can’t say more. I feel as if I have pulled myself out of shape and I need to restore myself somehow.’

Elizabeth took a small piece of linen and wrapped a piece of bread and cheese. ‘You walk,’ she advised. ‘Here is your dinner, and when you come home tonight I will have a good supper prepared for you. You look like a man who has been poisoned.’

John recoiled as if she had slapped him. ‘Poisoned? What are you saying?’

Elizabeth’s face was graver than ever. ‘I meant that you looked as if the court had not agreed with you, John. What else should I mean?’

He passed his hand quickly over his face as if he were wiping away a cold sweat. ‘It does not,’ he said. ‘It does not agree with me. For here I am as nervous as a deer when I should be quietly at peace and setting my seeds.’

He took the bread and cheese from her. ‘I’ll be home by dusk,’ he promised.

She drew him to her, took his worried face in her hands and drew his head down to her. She put a kiss on his brow, as if she were his mother blessing and absolving him. ‘You say a little prayer as you walk,’ she said. ‘And I shall pray for you while I set the house to rights.’

John reached for his hat and opened the door. ‘What shall you pray for me, Lizzie?’ he asked.

Elizabeth’s look was calm and steady. ‘That you shall avoid temptation, husband. For I think you have chosen a way which is much among the snares of the world.’

John worked through the spring with a dogged sullenness on the gardens of New Hall. The cherries which had always been his especial pleasure blossomed well, and he watched the pink and white buds swell and then bloom, denying his own feeling that since their master did not see them their sweetness was wasted.

Buckingham did not come. The rumour was that London was dreadfully infested by plague, the dead lying in the streets of the poorer quarters and the plague cart coming by two and three times a day, healthy citizens shrinking back into doorways and locking themselves into their houses, every man who could afford it moving out to the country and then finding that villages on the road from the capital barred their doors to London trade. No-one knew how the plague spread, perhaps it was by touch, perhaps it was in the air. People spoke of a plague wind as the season grew warmer and said that the soft warm breezes of spring blew the plague into your skin and set the buboes like eggs in your armpit and groin.